Aftermath: Hilary Tham Capital Collection

In Thomas March's debut collection, Aftermath, the author turns over a lifetime of queer desire never quite requited enough. In these poems, aesthetic payoffs arrive through technical precision, but desire, death, jealousy and grief stay as messy and unresolvable here as they are in life.

According to judge JoanLarkin, the poems explore "queer identity, troubled masculinity, and those unsettling truths that illuminate and disorient consciousness."

Startling aphorisms, like grief as "a cold bath / only your own / body warms," lie alongside generous sentences stretched taut over March's metrical frames. Even the most material of experiences, the weight of a drunk's dead body in his pallbearers' arms, glints with the clarity poetry can give it. March is never sentimental, but his personae understand desire for the sometimes petty, sometimes expansive experience that it is, and he gives us a collection that feels at once generous and sophisticated, full of poems wild with wanting, yet precisely controlled in their delivery. Aftermath is the introduction of a brave and essential new voice in American poetry.

A ftermath is intended for a general adult readership.